The Fall of Hacking

The great majority of the computer world in the 1980s was profoundly unsubversive. The smart, subversive people were a tiny minority. They seem a larger proportion when you look back from 30 years later, because the fakers and PHBs had no lasting effects.

Drama and marginal status doesn't make you a hacker. It just makes you a social outcast.

It's true that there are lots of wannabes today, too — more than ever before, now that the richest man in the world got that way by writing a BASIC interpreter, now that Sergey and Larry get to go to Davos.

But you want to see some real hackers? How about http://www.pouet.net/ where the demoscene posts their stuff? Have you not been to a Bar Camp? SuperHappyDevHouse? Hackerspaces like Noisebridge? How about Google, where Rob Pike now works since they've spent 9 years fixing http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/? How about biotech, where they reprogram the very stuff of life itself? How about the Netflix Prize, where AI predicts human preferences for money? How about the algorithmic trading funds that now account for the majority of trading volume on our stock exchanges? Have you been visiting http://www.gpgpu.org/ http://blog.reprap.org/ http://bathsheba.com/ http://www.tatjavanvark.nl/ etc.? How about thirty million people finding one hole after another in the firewall to communicate to each other and the rest of the world, when their election was stolen, through a humble Rails CRUD forum? How about http://vpri.org/html/writings.php, where the objective is to build a whole, modern personal computing environment in under 20 000 lines of code — and they just might do it? How about the OLPC project, where some real hackers — not losers stealing credit card numbers — figured out how to build a machine that would hold up to abuse from kids, in order to revolutionize the world education system (a la Diamond Age), an experiment which is still ongoing? How about Time Magazine listing moot as the most influential person in the world?

Some of these things are good, some are bad, and some are ineffectual. But they are hacking on a scale that you never imagined would be real, in your reclusive vampire credit-card fraud days. These are not people tweaking CSS in yuppie dress shirts, or patching some obsolete proprietary library. These are people pushing the boundaries of the possible.

There's a world of hacking out here.

Open your eyes.

The closest thing I can put to your description of "hacker" is the ZF0. http://r00tsecurity.org/files/zf05.txt . They "hack" as you say, it's a great read.

And guess where i found it? HN :P

1) Growing Complexity of Software Projects: in some sense, it's not about computer programmers "selling out." Because in both FOSS and enterprise software, the code-base has usually third-party dozens if not more dependencies. Writing software is now a team effort, and not a single team effort but more like a company-with-frontend-backend-QA-teams effort. Think back to the day when a individual or two person could write a 2D side-scroller in DOS, with thoughts and stressing even over the monster's sprites and midi soundtrack. Nowadays, an EA game is more like Wikipedia, with many contributors working without being conscious of others. And while Wikipedia is good by itself, but tell me, could Wikipedia contributors by their collective consciousness write War and Peace or Catcher in the Rye? Likewise, Emacs, Linux and Ruby were progenated by single individuals with their respective unfettered individual vision.

2) Compromising Hacking for Hacking's Purpose. Hacking started as an art, without regard for commerce; see RMS as an example of someone who followed his vision without regard for profits or social acceptance. Programming, in its current state, is funny enough the only art form where its leading vanguards and self-processed practitioners openly condone "selling out." I feel that programmers funny enough aren't complete sell-out's but are stuck in the middle ground, the worst of all places. We are told by Paul Graham & Company, that great hackers should be motivated by their craft intrinsically, but should either keep one's day job or start up our own company with an viable business strategy to save up for "fuck you money" (pardon my french). But in reality, having an corporate job or starting a Web 2.0 CRUD start-up makes you beholden to either your boss or your potential customers whom increasingly treat programmers as commodities/assembly-line workers to deliver business requirements. Tell me, did Van Gogh or Sylvia Plath do focus group/market research so that they could decide which colors and content category would be most pleasing to their audience before they set out to compose their painting/poetry? Similarly I'd argue either did Linus/RMS/Wozniak when they set out to hack. Art exists for itself, it serves no purpose. If it does find audience, the best art inspires, challenges and mocks the audience, but it never panders to its audience.

3) Lack of Encouragement in the Community to Buck the Status Quo; I guess that this point is related to my previous point - but I feel the ethos/outlook's of the early 90's at the dawn of personal computing was that anything was possible, whereas today is optimizing on status quo. A survey of new YC startup's include rehashes of social networks/blogs/online music. While occasionally Hacker News feature posts on AI, Bioinformatics, green technology and Arduino. Why is everybody crowded in the web space? Where are the implementation of the next generation's ideas? Ray Kurzweil talks about the coming of Singularity, for instance. I'd argue it is because people are so fixated on monetizing that they no longer push envelope.

I just realized that in my zeal, my commentary turned out to be still pretty liberal artsy. Like how Bob Dylan would respond to some heckler at some festival he played at some years back, the heckler said "hey, Bob Dylan your new songs are no longer as relevant as your old songs," to which Dylan responded, "well, I'm at least out here writing songs, what are you doing?" So I'm going to stop now and take OP's advice go hack now.

http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/mailing-lists.html

edit: oops, I thought you were responding to Kragen's comment. Read his 'blog' anyways, it's awesome :)